I used to write letters to this girl I barely knew.
We met on the internet back in the boom of girl-power blogs and feminista websites. Everyone was listening to Sleater-Kinney and talking about making the big pilgrimage out to Olympia. This was before people on the internet had the stigma of being social outcasts, and long, long before it came full circle to ubiquitous Facebook walls. We approached it as a new frontier in our quest to share ourselves with the world; it was the next step beyond Xeroxed ‘zines and hand-stapled manifestos sold at Powell’s. We poured our hearts out to each other in the digital age, fought the good fight through journal entries and self-taught webdesign until the rest of the world caught up with us. There’s a trail of diary-x, diaryland, and raw html pages out there, somewhere, abandoned on the internet. Go figure.
This girl wrote me letters about her life, and I wrote her letters about mine. Sometimes she’d send me love notes she didn’t have the nerve to send to the girl they were really for. I liked to pretend they were about me, but I wasn’t in love with her or anything. She was just another stranger.
I think about her from time to time. She probably thinks about me, too, in that same strange, off-hand way. There’s something haunting about that kind of intimacy; it cuts deeper than casual sex. We told each other secrets and shared emotions we couldn’t vocalize. We cheered each other on as we applied to our dream schools, got our hearts broken and wished for something more. If we knew each other face to face, none of that would have happened. We would have been two girls who grabbed a coffee or a movie a few times a week and never got past the surface.
I guess it sticks with me because there’s a sad honesty about it. None of the friends I have now know me half as well as that girl — we’ll call her A. It’s not that I intentionally keep myself cut off from the people I see day to day, it’s just that our social construct doesn’t allow for the kind of raw openness you can have with someone who can’t hold you accountable.
There are times I think about opening my mouth and sharing my thoughts with these people the way I did with A., but something always stops me. I crave that intellectual intimacy while I dig my heels in and resist it. I’m not sure what I’m afraid of, but when I think back to that time and space and that community of sharing, I know I’m not alone in that fear. For whatever reason, we all smother our true selves and keep up this meaningless patter.
The conversations I have with my best friend — we’ll call her M. — are all very insular. We talk about how much we need to get laid, how miserable we find the small school we secretly love attending, and criticize most of the people we deign to spend time with. Our common ground is solid but thin. I wonder what her letters to some anonymous girl would be like. Would she talk about living in the shadow of urban Tennessee ghettos and rap stars, while simultaneously waxing and grooming and refining herself into a modern day Scarlett O’Hara? Or would she talk about the small pleasures she derives from getting a text from a high school friend, or when an old CCR song comes on the radio and reminds her of drives in the country with her dad?
I know only bits and pieces of her, yet when anyone asks we unthinkingly name one another as our “best” friend. What that really means is that we like what the other one chooses to be, the front she puts on every day like a reliable pair of jeans.
We never get past the basics, because we don’t know how to be ourselves and look each other in the eye the next morning.
